Five US newspapers showed Palestine and the Palestinians more negatively than Israel, according to a study published Thursday. By relying more on Israeli sources, and by removing the basic facts that are useful for understanding the Israeli occupation.
The study, the first of its kind, was published by Laplace 416, a research and consulting firm based in Toronto, Canada. It relied on analysis of news and sentiment transmission techniques and data for nearly 100,000 titles in the five major newspapers since 1967. : The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Chicago Tribune, and The Los Angeles Times.
The authors put the headlines for five decades in two groups: the first includes 17,492 major titles about the Palestinians, and the second includes 82,102 headlines around Israel. They used available techniques to assess the degree to which "feelings" could be categorized into headings for positive, negative or neutral. They also studied the frequency of using certain words evoking a particular point of view or perception.
The study concluded that since 1967, the use of the word "occupation" has decreased by 85% in the Israeli headings and 65% in the Palestinian data collection. "Palestinian refugees" declined by 93%, the likelihood of quoting from Israeli sources increased by approximately 250% from the Palestinians, and the headlines of press articles focusing on Israel were four times higher than those focusing on Palestine.
The study also showed that words referring to violence, such as "terrorism", were used almost three times the word "occupation" in the Palestinian data collection. It has seldom been explicitly recognized that there is no legitimacy to Israeli settlements and settlers.
The study pointed out that the term "East Jerusalem", which distinguishes part of the city occupied by Israel in 1967 from the rest of the city, was mentioned a total of 132 times only. Coverage of the conflict has also fallen dramatically in the second half of the 50-year period.
In terms of the newspaper´s coverage of the negative coverage of the Palestinian story, the Los Angeles Times was the most likely to describe negative qualities, followed by the Wall Street Journal, the Chicago Tribune, The Washington Post, The New York Times, .
While a number of analyzes have been published on how to cover some of the news outlets of the conflict in recent years, the latest study offers a broader perspective, presented by the researchers Osed Siddiqui and Aweys Zahir, to the "416".
I think it helps us understand the different patterns of coverage over time and gives us more information that people can not simply ignore or deny, "says Canadian researcher Siddiqui, who produced the study.
"The role of the news in framing and reporting issues is powerful in setting the agenda and building novels that become the usual mood," said Zaher, the other researcher.
The authors say that the relationship between news and politics, as well as the resulting narratives, has been the subject of a large number of literature that has refined the concept of this conflict (for Americans). They cite American historian Hayden White in his 1980 book "For Critical Investigation," "The narrative in general, from the development of the folk tale to a novel, from the historical tale to history, shines people´s public perception, especially on the subjects of law or Legitimacy or illegality, or, in general, powerful power. "
The authors also cite what was written by the late Palestinian intellectual Edward Said after the book of White in four years, in his famous study "Authorization of the novel." He pointed out that even with the support of laws, international legitimacy, the authority of international law and international resolutions and consensus of the Palestinians, US policymakers, in cooperation with the US media and US think tanks, must link these things together, draw bright conclusions, and establish simple facts. "This rejection remains a fundamental pillar of American media and politics, including the rejection of the central truth that The narrative of the Palestinian narrative "stems directly from the story of their physical existence on their land and then forcibly uprooting them and forcibly displacing them from Palestine."
As Edward Said did, the researchers concluded that "the facts require a socially acceptable narrative to be understood, sustained, and mainstreamed, and in the United States, where Israeli propaganda (and propaganda for Israel) seems to lead a life of its own", far from the facts, General of these American newspapers according to the study.
The figures revealed by the study support the view of Edward Said 35 years ago, unequivocally with a quantitative advantage, showing a steady and systematic bias against the Palestinians, a static coverage spanning five decades, and systematic because the coverage has repeatedly responded to Israel´s need to justify its occupation.
One of the most overlooked and overlooked by the papers analyzed in the study is that the coverage of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict has declined dramatically since 1993, when Palestinians and Israelis began the peace process that no longer exists.
According to the study, "between 1967 and 1992, there was an average of 1,200 titles" covering the two sets of data ", while the average was only 700 average since then. This decline can be reasonably attributed to how American newspapers have since presented Palestinians as equal in negotiations, often portrayed in the media using the "both sides" framework. But this framework "deprives readers of the context," according to the study, which is fundamental to understanding the occupation.
According to the study, there is a deliberate distortion of the truth regarding the blockade of Gaza. It is rare to mention the siege in its real context, while the headlines examined in the study show that the use of the word "Hamas" is one of the most frequently used words in the headlines focusing on the Palestinians, Although the movement was founded in 1987. "This distortion of the situation in the Gaza Strip, which was ruled by Hamas for a decade, often led readers to connect the besieged region with terrorism and violence," according to the study.
In addition to the pressure on the efforts of pro-Israel lobbyists, recent shifts in US policy toward Palestine can also be attributed to biased coverage of the Palestinians and the apparent absence of the Palestinian cause. The Palestinian issue, the recognition of occupied Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and the transfer of the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to it, these political shifts coincided with a consistent omission of the facts in American newspapers. "It is not just the Trump administration ... We do not see a greater decline in issues like UNRWA because the coverage of a Palestinian refugee issue is systematically controlled by the editorial staff of the newspapers," the study said.
The study found that the American television media is also more guilty of ignoring Palestinian voices. The study found that the American media gives the Palestinian side less than 25% of what it gives to the Israeli side, as we saw in the aggression on Gaza in the summer of 2014, Continue for 51 days.
